-Mike Awoyinfa
Exactly 70 years today, Africa’s business guru and entrepreneur extraordinaire, Dr. Mike Adenuga, GCON, came into the world via Adeoyo Hospital, Ibadan, born to Pa Michael Agbolade Adenuga, an educationist and his entrepreneurial wife, Mama Oyindamola whose business genes and can-do attitude the baby will inherit and go on to extraordinarily conquer the world of business.
The arrival of Mike brought unparalleled joy to the Adenuga family. According to Mrs. E.O. Osunsade, Mike Adenuga’s late eldest sister, their parents who got married in 1937 for a long time did not have a boy.
“It took roughly ten years after marriage that the first boy, Demola, came,” she told me while interviewing her for a book on his famous younger brother.
“For them, having a second son (Mike) made them very happy. I don’t know why. Prior to that, my mother had lost some pregnancies. Actually, Mike came in as a gift at a point they were trying to end having children. My father decided to name him after himself. My father’s name was Mike Agbolade.
His son’s name is Michael Adeniyi. As the last child, he was given some extra care than we had. I remember him as a charming, chubby handsome young man.”
Judging from the monumental successes Mike Adenuga, the founder of the Nigerian telecoms brand, Glo has made and the fact that he owned two banks while still in his thirties, some influential Nigerians think, it’s high time Mike Adenuga invited a good biographer-just like Steve Jobs did by inviting one of my mentors: Walter Isaacson, a former editor of TIME magazine and CNN top shot-to objectively capture the story of his life with a view to publishing it into a book that would inspire Nigerian youths to follow in his footsteps and using his success strategies to become the next Mike Adenuga.
